Chapter Text
Will Byers is starting to think the six months he spent in California weren’t real.
He went to school in Lenora like everyone else, and made meaningless small talk like everyone else, and participated in the school’s extracurricular arts program because his mom looked like she’d cry if he kept leaving his paintings to dry in the living room, but nobody in California looked at him like they did in Hawkins.
Nobody at Lenora seemed to care about the things that’d defined his whole life in middle school. Nobody even bullied him, which should have been a blessing, but all it did was make him feel like a ghost. He felt restrained, sluggish, always moving through his days like time had congealed around him. Something somewhere in the back of his head demanded escape, demanded cold; more often than not, Will found himself running the shower until the water turned to ice down his back.
Sometimes, Will would think about standing up in the lunchroom and screaming as loud as he can, which is pretty goddamn loud, or skipping school for a week, or breaking into the office to yell swear words down the PA system. Something to make people look at him. Something to prove that they could see him.
He never did, of course. He went to school, spoke when spoken to, and painted. Life in California consisted of little else than this.
It’s much colder in Indiana than it is in the Golden State. It’s sharp, pointed, and undeniably real.
As they drive past the ‘Welcome to Hawkins’ sign, Will feels alive for the first time in six months. Here, he can move again, limbs loosening and joints cracking pleasantly. He notes with a disgusted detachment that he hasn’t liked anything but cold weather since ‘84.
From what he can see as they drive alone towards town, Hawkins hasn’t changed since they left, unless Will’s counting the x-marks-the-spot supermassive gate to hell.
But that’s okay, because Will hasn’t changed, either.
They’re about ten minutes from the Wheeler’s when Will finally feels it. Bugs crawl under his skin; he sits up straight, pressing a hand to his neck, lurching a little against the car door.
“Will?” says Eleven. He just stares at her.
“You okay?” Mike asks, eyebrows narrowing, and he reaches forward like he’s gonna touch Will’s shoulder.
“I’m fine,” Will blurts. He clears his throat theatrically, rubbing at the space between his collarbones. “Just something in my throat.”
In the rearview mirror, Will can see Jonathan squinting at his reflection. He ignores it.
The Mind Flayer sinks his teeth further into Will’s spine.
Hawkins hasn’t changed.
~
People leave town in droves.
Mike and Nancy are dragged out of the state by force one night, because Karen is smart and she knows her children well enough to understand they’d never abandon Hawkins if she just asked them to.
Will wakes up in a cold sweat the morning after they disappear; Eleven is standing over his bed, eyes wide, blood dripping down her lip.
“Gone,” is all she says.
Will can’t say he’s upset. If Mike’s out of the state, he’s safe - and Nancy, too. Little Holly, who deserves to grow up in a normal place. A dream, like California.
Dustin’s mother begs and begs uselessly for her son to escape with her, while the Sinclairs dig their heels into the asphalt and refuse to leave. Max’s mom won’t go, either. Steve’s parents were away when this all went down, and they don’t come back. Steve just shrugs when Will asks him if they know he’s still here.
Robin, Steve’s friend, shows up at the dwindling refugee center one day with a snotty nose and red eyes. She whispers to some girl at the sandwich stand for fifteen minutes and it ends with Steve explaining to the Party, tight-lipped, that she’s staying with him for the time being. Her parents left without her.
As for Will and his family, there wasn’t really any choice. They set up in Hopper’s old cabin, the five of them cramped into a house meant for two, and it’s miserable, but it’s fine. The spring turns cold, the flowers all die, but they’re together and alive and it’s fine.
Will’s fine.
~
He starts coughing again.
Jonathan fusses over him like Will’s still twelve years old, his worry made worse by the fact that they not only share a room, but are shoulder-to-shoulder every night in what feels like a twin sized bed. Every little noise Will makes in the night sends Jonathan’s eyes snapping open, hands reaching for the gun he keeps in their bedside drawer.
Still, Jonathan doesn’t rat him out, telling Mom that it’s just a cold - that Will’s readjusting to Indiana’s pollen, or whatever. She gets concerned when phlegm starts sliding down his throat and he can’t help but start hacking at the dinner table, but she doesn’t push.
Will’s sure that she and Eleven suspect something’s wrong, but he keeps his eyes on the floor and pretends like his head is still his own, and for the most part it works to keep him feeling normal.
As for Hopper, he doesn’t sleep much anymore. This is a problem whenever the other part hits and Will has to rocket out of bed and scramble to the bathroom, bile rising in his throat.
On these occasions, when Hopper catches Will bent over the toilet with tears pricking at his eyes, he sits down in the doorway until the nausea passes, probably just to make sure Will doesn’t choke and die. The first time it happened, Will was embarrassed, but Hopper didn’t say anything as he handed Will a cap of Listerine and now there’s a delirious part of his brain that counts it as father-son bonding time.
The rational part is still just embarrassed.
Mostly, Will’s surprised that his mom hasn’t figured it out yet, hasn’t sat him down and demanded an explanation for his behavior. Since they left Hawkins and since Hopper died, she hasn’t been as attentive as was when he was younger. The newfound freedom would be nice if Will actually had anywhere to go or anyone to hang out with, but in California it had resulted in Will sitting at home for hours on end while his mom worked and Jonathan was - busy.
Even when the whole house stank of marijuana and Will would go for hours without moving from the couch, she didn’t say a word to either of them. Will had been worried about her, scanning her for any sign of the glaze over her eyes from before. She wasn’t getting bad again, though, so it was fine - and she’s happier, now that Hopper’s back. She must be getting better. He doesn’t want her to worry, so he clamps his teeth shut every time his head starts to scream for him to spill his guts to her.
They do spend some time together, just the two of them, back in Hawkins. In the evenings, when the sun is peering through the trees, Joyce likes to sit down on the porch with Will as he sketches. Without fail, she drapes an arm over his shoulder and leans against him. She’s smaller than he remembers. Or maybe he’s bigger.
“You know, there was a time when I didn’t think I’d get this,” she says, once, when it’s getting dark again and the snow falls thicker than usual.
Will’s hand stills over the paper, just for a moment. “I’m right here,” he says, pressing a little against her in reassurance.
Joyce tightens her grip. “I know,” she says softly. She’s turned to look at him, taking in his profile, the shadows under his eyes. He looks back at her, cowardly in his half-lidded stare.
“I know,” she repeats, and drapes his hand with her own over the paper. She traces his fingers with her cigarette-stained nails. She’s warm. Will feels, inexplicably, too small for his grown-up body, and shivers.
“I’m a little cold,” he explains to her instead of I love you, and Joyce tsks, rubbing her hand up and down his arm.
“Then let’s go inside, baby,” she says.
He nods, but makes no move to get up. Her words ricochet around his skull, and he just has to ask, now or never. “Mom - what do you mean? That you didn’t think you’d get this?”
She’s quiet for a minute. She raises her hand to her mouth, thinking, and Will does the same, pressing his teeth against the sides of his fingers.
“I get to see you get better at drawing,” Joyce says. “I get to tell you to stop biting your nails,” and this is accompanied by a soft shove at his wrist, “I get to see you with your grandmother’s nose. Your dad’s hair. Jonathan’s hands.”
Will has to look away from her, face too hot, her eyes too sharp.
“You’ve grown so much,” she says, the words weighted. “It’s hard to forget how I felt during the days when I thought I might have lost you forever.”
And Will doesn’t know how she hasn’t figured it out - that he never did grow up, that this isn’t the kid who left Mike Wheeler’s basement three years ago, just the shell of whatever’s left, and she’s been loving half a person ever since he vomited up a slug into their sink.
“I’m right here, Mom,” he says.
His mom smiles, squeezes him one more time, and then they go inside. Will wonders exactly when she stopped being able to see right through him.
Or maybe, when he began to lie.
~
Dustin limps, now. Steve says it’s all in his head, but Dustin insists that it hurts, that maybe he broke it and it’s set wrong, because putting too much weight on it sends pain shooting up his calf and sets his hands to shaking.
Whenever it’s brought up, Steve looks at Dustin weird when he thinks no one’s watching. Will sees it every time, and once again feels his absence from Hawkins painfully behind his ribs like an organ’s missing.
Thankfully, he has his chances to catch up with his old friends - it’s not completely hopeless. The Party (new, extended version!) likes to hike out to an isolated clearing in the woods together when the school gymnasium starts to smell too much like sweat and blood and all of their houses feel like tombs.
Will likes it out there. Though the woods are never his favorite place to be, it’s okay when he’s with El and Steve, Dustin, even Robin, despite the fact that they haven’t really talked at all. Lucas comes when he can, but most of his time is spent at the hospital. He’s read half of the library to Max, by now.
Steve drives them out to the halfway point most of the time, packed into the car with no seatbelts on and a flamethrower in the trunk, just in case. They leave the car by the side of the road and set off, chattering aimlessly, tripping over leaves and rocks and sticks.
Dustin gets quiet the further they walk. When they get there he sits down heavily underneath the rocks that dot the clearing, and listens to Robin pick on Steve or watches Eleven make leaves float in a figure-eight. Will sits with him, even though he doesn’t understand the silence. Sketching Dustin as he picks at the bracelet around his wrist becomes a regular study.
On these excursions especially, Will misses Mike. Eleven misses him more, probably; he can see the little pinch in her eyes whenever his name is brought up. It’s nothing like the roiling guilt in his stomach. It’s love - it’s sadness at being separated from such a sure thing.
He’s sorry for her. They’d just gotten each other back. It’s not fair. She must miss him.
It’s not fair.
~
Argyle doesn’t go back to California, which is weird, in Will’s opinion.
At first, he crashes in his van for a couple nights because he doesn’t want to refill the gas tank and head back, and then it’s because there’s something wrong with one of his tires, and by the time Hopper exasperatedly fixes that, Argyle admits he just doesn’t want to leave.
Which, again, Will thinks is weird, considering the devastation Hawkins has just seen. But Argyle himself is weird, so it makes sense if he doesn’t think about it too hard.
Argyle makes a little home out of the Surfer Boy Pizza Shop van. He stays there, rain or shine, doing whatever it is people from California do in their free time. Eleven offers to let him have the opposite couch, saying she doesn’t mind sharing the space, but Argyle refuses. He’s a gentleman like that.
Jonathan spends a lot of his time out there with him. Some nights, Will wakes up to an empty bed and the quiet sound of talking filtering through their window. He’ll look out and see Jonathan sitting on the roof of the van with Argyle, smoking, and catch the occasional never seen that much blood or didn’t really know people could die like that, man.
It’s fair enough. Will had watched that agent choke under his hands. His fingers had slipped in blood, all that red dotting the van’s carpet. Staining under Jonathan’s nails because of a bullet meant for Will’s head.
So maybe it’s weird, but he gets it - Argyle stays in Hawkins, because where else can you go after your life’s been ruined by Will Byers?
~
Dustin says, “We buried his guitar instead of him.”
Will looks up from his sketchbook, confused. “What?”
Dustin picks at his bracelet. Further out, Lucas and Steve are wrestling on the forest floor, and El’s cheering them on like the bad influence she is.
Will puts down his pencil. “Buried who?” he asks.
Dustin sighs, leaning his head against the wall of rock. “Eddie Munson. You may have heard about him.”
“The one they’re blaming for the murders,” Will remembers. Somewhere in the chaotic explanation of whatever the fuck happened here, he’s pretty sure he remembers that name being thrown out.
“He’s innocent,” Dustin grits out. “He couldn’t hurt anyone. But nobody gets to know that.”
Will taps the page with the pencil lead softly. “I’m sorry.”
“I had to leave his body there,” Dustin says, “I tried to get him out but my leg wouldn’t fucking work, it -”
A weighted silence.
“We buried his guitar instead of him,” Dustin repeats slowly, like he’s said it a hundred times. “In a box. So it wouldn’t get dirty. I dug the hole with his uncle and we buried his guitar instead of him.”
Will doesn’t know what to do. Steve would know, but Dustin chose to tell him. Dustin chose him.
Will grits his teeth and holds his arms out. Dustin doesn’t slam into him like Will knows he can, there’s no shattering of ribs, there’s just the sound of fabric against rock and then a weight on his chest.
Dustin slumps into him like all the grief of the past three years is finally catching up to him, and Will blinks, pressing his nose into his friend’s hair.
“We buried you, too,” Dustin mumbles into Will’s shirt, sniffling.
Will still doesn’t know what to do, limbs cold and stiff, but he clamps them around Dustin’s shoulders and clings to the unfamiliar shape of someone who was once his best friend.
“That’s what hurts,” Dustin says, still not moving. “I saw it. I know he can’t come back. But my stupid head won’t stop thinking about it.”
Will breathes in.
“We don’t lose,” Dustin says, “we just don’t! But he’s -”
Will breathes out.
“We buried you.” Dustin pushes away from Will, stares him dead in the eyes for the first time in years. “I don’t tell you enough that I’m - that I love you.”
The words catch in Will’s throat. He knows he’s taking too long, that his mouth has been open this whole time, but -
“I love you too,” Will says.
Dustin grins up at him, even though his eyes are watering. “Good job, buddy. Big step for you.”
To his horror, Will’s ears start to burn. “Okay, dude.” He shoves Dustin off of him and picks his sketchbook up off the ground, refusing to look at anything but the sky.
In the clearing Steve shouts, victorious over Lucas, but before he can rub it in any more, Robin appears out of nowhere and tackles him to the forest floor.
Dustin cheers, hooting and hollering; looking at the scene before him, face red and chest comfortably warm, Will feels like things might just turn out okay.
~
He visits Max once and only once.
Lucas takes him up to her room, treading the path like he could walk it with his eyes closed. They don’t even ask for his name at the front desk. Will feels guilty.
“The doctors don’t know when she’ll wake up,” Lucas says. He ushers Will into Max’s room, filled with the beeping of machines and the smell of ammonia. Flowers line the countertop, and there’s a stack of books pushed into one corner.
Will doesn’t like hospitals. He likes the brace around Max’s neck even less.
“You said she was possessed?” he asks numbly, crossing his arms and hunching his shoulders.
Lucas nods. He reaches out, takes Max’s hand. “Vecna got her,” he says tightly. “I wasn’t fast enough.”
Vecna. The Mind Flayer. Whatever they’re calling it now. Will feels cold, all of a sudden, looking at the bruised color of Max’s eyelids.
He doesn’t want to imagine Max stuck like he’d been, doesn’t want to know that she might never wake up - and even if she does, that she might never be the same. That she might be like him. Half-human forever. Broken.
“You don’t have to stay,” Lucas says. Will looks up and meets his stare, his friend’s eyes drilling into his skull so hard he has to take a step back. When did Lucas get so tall?
Will swallows. “Are you sure?”
Lucas nods. “I’ve been here by myself lots of times. I’ll be fine.”
Will says, “I’m sorry. I hope - I hope she gets better soon.”
“Thanks.” Lucas looks at him, eyes sympathetic.
“I’m sorry,” Will says again, throat burning, then he turns and walks away from Lucas, from comatose Max Mayfield, and from him.
~
“Sorry,” Will says to Eleven one night, both of them wrist deep in dirty dishwater.
She scrubs calmly at a plate. “Why?”
“In California,” he mumbles, rinsing off his mom’s favorite mug, “I didn’t, um. I wasn’t there for you.”
El frowns. “That’s not true,” she tells him.
“It is. I never said anything to those people. I never defended you.”
“You were there for me,” she insists. “Protecting me isn’t your job.”
“I should have tried,” Will says, setting down a plate with a hard clink. “It was just like - like I couldn’t move, like I wasn’t there. Like you were the only person I could talk with. Like no one else could see me.”
“You felt like that?” El asks, cocking her head. “Like you weren’t real?”
Will swallows hard. “I’m not trying to make excuses.”
“Will, I don’t care about Angela,” El says, tone serious. “I hit her with a skate. Were you not happy in California?”
“I thought you regretted the skate incident,” Will says.
El shrugs. “Hurting people is bad,” she says, which is not an answer, but whatever. “Did you hear my question?”
“Yes,” Will sighs. “It’s not a big deal, I - I was happy. It was just…”
He stops, hands halfway to the faucet. “Hot,” he says lamely.
“You’re not happy here, either,” she says tentatively.
“No,” Will says quietly. “I don’t know.”
“You’re sick,” she says, not a question.
Will’s silent. His mouth dries, the back of his head tingling.
“Is he back?” El asks. Her hands have tightened around a handful of spoons. “In your head?”
The room pulses. Will leans forward over the sink and draws in a shaky breath.
“I don’t know,” he says honestly. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
“I am worried about you,” El says. Her hand reaches for his back, settling gently between his shoulderblades.
“If it gets bad, I’ll tell you,” Will mumbles. “If I start seeing things.”
El purses her lips. “You have to promise.”
“I promise,” Will says.
Somewhere out in the dark, the gate to hell burns. Somewhere in the dark, the other half of Will Byers waits, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him.